


Gentleness, fear, and joy

by Joysweeper



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, canon-typical overthinking, gender euphoria, morphing sentient beings, nebulous gender feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 08:34:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joysweeper/pseuds/Joysweeper
Summary: The first time that I morphed Taylor all on my own it was a mistake.





	Gentleness, fear, and joy

The first time that I morphed Taylor all on my own it was a mistake.

I mean, I morphed her deliberately, it wasn't an allergy or anything. I flew over buildings, ignoring the sounds of traffic, the clubs pumping music, the people going about their lives, I found an alley that looked like it was on the clean side and didn't have a constant stream of people passing on the sidewalk. I had to do some precision flying to get down to the cracking weed-heavy concrete, but it was pretty easy. Now the only person I knew who couldn't have taken their raptor morph right down into the narrow space between buildings without having to land on one of the roofs first was Loren, and she was getting better.

She wasn't here, though. I hawk-walked behind a Dumpster, getting out of sight on pure instinct, and closed my eyes to focus on Taylor's face, her slender hands with the slightly prominent thumb joints, the column of her neck. It really wasn't that different from morphing any other human body. Humans are all way more like other humans than they're like anything else, even chimps. Lots of things have a better sense of smell than humans but they're still better at it than hawks, so the alley started smelling worse. The worst part was probably the tobacco. If I have to say anything nice about Yeerks, it's that Controllers don't often smoke or drink.

The last changes were to my legs, which stayed hawk-legs with knees bound to my chest for way, way too long, and my feathers. I rose up away from the ground as my legs grew straighter and thicker and most of all _longer_ , feeling heavy and rounded and a little bit precarious on top of them. Then my feathers faded and the air seemed colder, and I realized that all I was wearing was underwear and stockings and that tight thin-strapped top Rachel had called a 'cami', when she'd picked out clothing that would look good on my borrowed body. These were the only parts of that outfit that had been tight enough to stay with the morph.

I could feel this kind of burning in my face remembering. When Rachel had been arranging my outfit I'd been trying so hard to pretend I didn't want to be there. The others had all been reminding us about the time, Marco had had about three smarmy comments about how long women take to shop, and I'd been nervous and aware of how strange this was, and there'd been this intensity in Rachel as she looked at me and held cloth against my borrowed skin -

A door clicked open and I went absolutely still in sudden terror. Someone on the other side of the Dumpster had come out into the alley and they could walk over and _see_ me, and I didn't know just what would happen then but the fear had my big slow human heart racing. I could hear a lighter flicking, taste the cigarette smoke get about five times stronger, and I had to work to control my breathing. Don't cough, don't gasp, stay quiet...

It wasn't really like the fear of morphing cockroach out in light and air, or any of a dozen other times being another animal has flooded me with adrenaline. It wasn't even like morphing Hork-Bajir on a treeless plain. It was from _me_ somehow, and I couldn't just push past it in the same way. I could have dealt with it if I had to, walked out and past the guy, I knew most likely nothing would happen, but -

Miserable, I realized I shouldn't be doing this. Waiting for the guy to finish his smoke break - it was an older woman, actually, I saw her going back in and felt like an idiot - felt like the most stressed I'd been since the end of the war. It's funny. I'd forgotten my aunt smoked. And I had to guess, too, that there's nothing natural about wearing clothes, but when you grow up with the idea that humans should be clothed in public it sinks in and it sticks to the morph's mind. I wasn't even naked, really, but this wasn't a bathing suit or a morphing outfit. When things had started Rachel had had a leotard handy and Cassie had picked out those Day-Glo shorts and neither of them had had to be caught out in underwear.

As soon as it was clear I demorphed and flapped hard to get out of the alley and away, berating myself. I was such a creep. Later, I was a coward. I swore I'd never try this again.

I guess I should stop and explain why I wanted to morph Taylor in the first place. Some of it is that I don't actually spend _all_ my time feeling sad in the woods. I see Toby and some of the other Hork-Bajir every couple months, and sometimes I morph Ket for that to hang out better. I see Loren about that often, and go flying with her. Less often I'll listen to Cassie talk about all the things she's been doing, and maybe twice a year I'll exchange a message with Ax through her. They all know I'll fly off if I get uncomfortable and don't mention it when they see me again.

And that's good but they've all got their own things going on, and all that history kind of presses in even when they don't. Sometimes I want to get away from my territory and from being a hawk and just be human for a little while, in sort of an anonymous way. Not schlubby loser Tobias. Not that Marine I met when we were preventing World War Three, either, that would be weird. But I remember being Taylor in the mall, and I remember how it wasn't really like anything else. I hadn't minded being her.

She's probably dead. The Yeerk might have survived, probably didn't, but a lot of Taylor the girl was still flesh and bone. She probably died in the explosion, or shortly afterwards. I don't think she had anyone alive on her side to rescue her if she hung on a little while.

If she's still alive, somewhere, does she think of me? Or is her life so full of people they fill her thoughts up, and I'm a footnote? Maybe she learned about the Animorphs and went, oh, the hawk Andalite must have been Tobias, and she went on with her life and everything is full and interesting. I know the others thought she was just evil, but she tried to warn me about her Yeerk. Maybe they weren't ever as tangled up as I thought.

Taylor's probably dead, though. And I know I always thought of her and Rachel, but she was like me. After the fire there were all those people in her life who didn't see her as worth anything. I dealt okay with that, I think, but for me it was always like that. I had people who'd maybe have an okay conversation if it didn't get too long or too weird, I had people who tolerated me and did what they had to, but that's it. It can imagine having my friends and a fairytale family all close around me and then being hurt so bad and having them all pull away. I always feel like it could happen - some of it has - but again, I didn't grow up with people, I can't take them for granted.

If someone in the Sharing had really offered, I don't know what I would have done. They probably wouldn't have told me exactly what it meant to have a Yeerk in my head. I don't know if they told her. Without going and trying to find out if she lived somehow I can't know, and I kind of don't actually want to find out.

If she's dead, though, part of her, a little copy of her DNA, is still around as part of me. When I morph into her my thoughts are filtered through some copy of her brain as it could have been, if things hadn't gone so awful. I almost want to say it's like giving her another chance, but I know it's really about me.

I can think about Taylor all I want but it's not like me, how _I_ feel, isn't a big part of it. The instincts that come with her body got pretty unpleasant when I wasn't ready that time, but they'd been so different back when I was. People looked at me different. I liked it.

So. Six weeks later I came better prepared with a bundle of cloth. A T-shirt. Leggings. Flip flops. A digital watch. Carrying all that into the city, even in neat burrito form, was not fun, let me say. Hawks are not good at making deliveries.

When I morphed and put the clothes on the T-shirt turned out to be really oversized, like, the neck hole wasn't centered oversized so it was almost off my shoulder. The straps of the sandals felt weird and intrusive between my toes, and it was actually kind of cold for them. I guess I'm too used to California weather. And my hair wasn't really neat because this had been one of the morphs where you get really lopsided and end up falling over, and I'm not sure how much combing it with my fingers helped. Plus I didn't have make-up. All in all I was really conscious that I didn't look as good as Rachel had made me, and between that and not having all my friends looking out for me I didn't feel as bulletproof as I'd been that time in the mall. People didn't turn to look when I went out on the sidewalk.

But it wasn't bad, either. People didn't turn to watch but they met my eyes, and I met their eyes, and it was a kind of charge. Sometimes they smiled and I would have thought it was the usual meaningless social smile, but I felt my face pulling into a smile too until I just had this dorky grin. Some guy whistled and later that felt kind of weird but in the moment it was just one more pleasurable jolt. By the time I reached the bookstore I almost felt like I'd morphed Ax instead. Having Taylor's body around people is like what having my hawk's body is to flying. It feels right. It feels good, in a way my old human body never did, even alone. I knew everyone I saw could just turn on me, I still felt a little of that fear, but mostly, I felt good.

And I forgot to bring money to actually buy a book, so I guess I'll have to do this again.

**Author's Note:**

> Tobias liking being whistled at is incorporating something I've read about men thinking they'd enjoy being catcalled, because they're rarely complimented on their appearance and may find it thrilling. Not having been submerged in the culture of being a girl and a woman, Tobias is only really aware of how disturbing and dangerous men's attention can be from hearing Rachel talk about it.
> 
> He's consciously attributing enjoying this outing to his Taylor morph's instincts, and those don't hurt, but the gender part is there.


End file.
